I can see where your'e coming from, and agree with you except for one thing. It is difficult to accept reprisal when you ask a question. Granted, some posts deserve reprisal, but my point is that sometimes a newbie will make a mistake and mess up and then get flamed. It's different if he/she has been warned a couple times about something, and yet they still do it, but mistakes happen.
We were all newbies at one point (I still am in some areas) and I think that it is important to remember that.

Besides that, I think that you are right and that sometimes you just have to bite your toungue and take criticism.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other